Attention all Knifemakers!.....Product dealers/retailers and/or knife makers/sharpeners/hobbyists (etc) are not permitted to insert business related text/videos/images (company/company name/product references) and/or links into your signature line, your homepage url (within the homepage profile box), within any posts, within your avatar, nor anywhere else on this site. Market research (such as asking questions regarding or referring to products/services that you make/offer for sale or posting pictures of finished projects) is prohibited. These features are reserved for supporting vendors and hobbyists.....Also, there is no need to announce to the community that you are a knifemaker unless you're trying to sell something so please refrain from sharing.
Thanks for your co-operation!

If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

None of my J knives have a dead flat spot,something I noticed a very long time ago.I did make a knife with a very large dead flat spot and did not really notice any clunk.It could be the thousands of hours tossing a 90lb jack hammer around that stops me from feeling a knife hitting a wood board in a way that would cause me a problem,it also could be my poor knife skills.I know the proper profile does not have a dead flat spot but I can say I did not notice the difference,I am sure if I had to prep for 5 hours I would have a different opinion.

Do you guys like your gyuto to have a little relief in the heel so that when you come down with the heel you can roll your edge easily past parallel to the cutting board?

I ask this because I have a new MAC pro 9.5, just a few weeks old, and it seems to be a clunker. Compared to a Hattori, Shun, Messermiester and Carbonext, this knife really just thuds when I roll towards the heel. It's a very uncomfortable feeling and none of the knives listed above felt this way. I'm not sure if I should try to sharpen this out of the knife or send it out (either back to MAC or to someone who can sharpen better than myself).

Do you guys like your gyuto to have a little relief in the heel so that when you come down with the heel you can roll your edge easily past parallel to the cutting board?

I ask this because I have a new MAC pro 9.5, just a few weeks old, and it seems to be a clunker. Compared to a Hattori, Shun, Messermiester and Carbonext, this knife really just thuds when I roll towards the heel. It's a very uncomfortable feeling and none of the knives listed above felt this way. I'm not sure if I should try to sharpen this out of the knife or send it out (either back to MAC or to someone who can sharpen better than myself).

That's exactly what I hate. It's probably not a big deal to fix when sharpening. You lower the handle a bit while working the heel and this should correct it although some blending this new section into the rest will help - do this through strokes on the stone. I wouldn;t send it back to MAC for correction - they already made it wrong once.

A tiny bit of relief at the heel really helps the feel of a knife. I have a fairly light touch on the board, but there are a couple knives in my extended batterie which suffer from excessive flatness towards the heel. That thunk when it hits the board is a bit annoying both in sound and feel.

Originally Posted by Dave Martell
Seems like this bit of knowledge has been overlooked a lot lately. I see so much talk of flat profiles that it's influencing how knives are made and maintained.

Can you please elaborate on this a bit? To me, flatter profiles have always been a draw of Japanese knives in general, yet some do it better than others to meet the needs of people like me. Are makers now changing their designs to meet this 'new'(?) demand for flatter/much less belly and making dead-flat knives that turn out to be duds?

Not that i want to term knives as being dudds, because each knife to its perfered user. but i think there is a blatant style/form being used by some makers. i recently took some measurments of my konosuke and hattorii kf and Tojiro to work with Pier Rodrigue on a custom. I would classify the shape of the hattorii to be my favorite, for future reference. ...

The kono plays into that current form "A" i think, flatter length before the sweep, it has a percentage of flat spot that is close to 40% of blade length. i measured mine as 103mm/232mm heel to tip lenght as being flat before it broke to the curve and reached the tip. There are a couple of other makers out there with similar designs, i think they are all working on that lazer classification but all im saying is as i cycle through various retailers i can look at something and say that shape isnt far off the kono shape, prolly not gonna work for me. that type of blade shape is kinda cut and dry i think. it either works or it doesnt. and its not so great for me. the kono might be on the lower side of flatness being a mass production knife i think its a good example and a development off of a Tadatsuna Inox gyuto of years past. just trying to use an example of something for the masses.

I dont see too much out there with the long gracefull sweep i have on my Hattorii. @ 240mm its flat spot is only 52mm long before it breaks and its a long 190mm before it hits the tip, which comes up 5mm higher from the table than the kno if you stood the heel up on its edge and measure tip to table. 19mm kono and 24mm hattorii.

its not a judgement, something out there for all. i just thought that maybee i could provide a perspective.

i like a sizable portion of the heel to be in contact with the board. i don't turn it into an architects straight edge, and when you rest the edge on a hard/flat surface you can tell that there is a subtle curve all the way through, but when used on a board the curve is subtle enough that there is a large contact patch when the edge sinks into the wood. almost every good Japanese gyuto i have owned has been ground like this out of the box, though hand-sharpened knives have typically been under ground about an inch from the heel, so i have to flatten and thin to fix the hole. i don't remove a lot of steel, and it only takes about 10 minutes, as i'm just taking a hole out and fixing the contact patch.

my KS is a bit extreme, in that it was board flat from the heel to about a third of the way up the blade. it works great, and doesn't clunk. it is certainly not "dead ass." however, i don't really rock the blade, instead using a small forward or rearward motion while push-cutting, as i find that it is a wasteful motion, so perhaps it's technique dependent. when i've talked about flattening heels, making sure that there is a good contact patch and no holes is what i've meant. i don't particularly like gyutos that are very flat from heel to tip, but that has more to do with my preferred wrist angle when i use the tip for fine work, than it is for anything else. i think having a contact patch large enough for typical use is a good thing.